Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

Power and Security
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The problem with this account of power is that it is self-evidently false – or
rather can only be made true by the addition of so many qualifications that
the clarity of the original idea is lost and the proposition simply becomes the
tautology that the more powerful state is the state that gets its way in any
relationship. To employ an oft-cited example, it is clear that by any attribute
measure of power the United States was a stronger country than North
Vietnam, and that even in terms of the resources devoted to the Vietnam
War the United States had more men, tanks, planes and ships committed
than had the North Vietnamese. If we want to explain why, nonetheless, the
United States was effectively defeated by North Vietnam, we have to
develop our analysis in various ways. In the first place, we have to introduce
into our calculations factors such as the quality of the leadership of the two
countries, and the effects of their domestic political and social structures on
the conduct of the war – the role, for example, of the American media in
undermining support for the war in the United States, the skill of the
Vietnamese army at irregular jungle warfare, and the inability of the United
States to find local allies with sufficient support in the countryside of
Vietnam. Each of these factors could be assimilated to a basic force model –
after all, the skill of its army and political elite has always been identified as
an element of the power of a state – but only at the cost of introducing
highly subjective elements into the calculation. The merit of the basic force
model is that it allows us to make more or less precise calculations – this is
lost if we have to start assessing the relative skills of national leaderships.
However, there are two more fundamental objections to the basic force
model; first, the context within which power is exercised is important, as
is, second, the asymmetrical nature of many power relationships. As to
context, very few relationships actually only involve two actors. Generally
there are many other parties indirectly involved. In the Vietnam War numer-
ous third parties influenced the outcome. We simply cannot say what would
have happened had the United States been able to act without bearing in
mind the reactions of, on the one hand, North Vietnam’s potential allies,
China and the Soviet Union, or, on the other, America’s own allies in the
Pacific and Europe. A pure two-actor power relationship is very unusual,
and certainly was not present here.
If anything, asymmetry is even more important than context. The differ-
ence between compellance and deterrence, referred to above, is part of this.
What exactly it was that the United States wanted in Vietnam was never
clear (that was one of their problems), but it certainly involved a number of
positive changes to the political architecture of Vietnam, such as the emer-
gence of a government in the South capable of winning the allegiance of
the people. The North Vietnamese, on the other hand, simply wanted the
Americans to go away; they were confident that if they did go away
they would be able to deal with any local opposition – as indeed proved to
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be the case. The North Vietnamese could wait; their aim was to win by
surviving, rather than to bring about any positive change in their relation-
ship with the United States.
This opens up a dimension of relational power that goes well beyond the
basic force model of power. One definition of power is that power is the
ability to resist change, to throw the costs of adaptation on to others, and,
characteristically, the ability to resist change requires fewer resources to be
placed on the line than the ability to bring changes about. In international
politics as in war, the assumption must be that there are tactical advantages
to a defensive as opposed to an offensive posture.
What all this suggests is that it is not possible to assimilate attribute and
relational power into one algorithm, or at least that such an algorithm
would have to be so complicated, and hedged around with so many provisos,
that it would not be able to perform the role of simplifying the analysis of
power. This is unfortunate, because there are a number of circumstances
where we might actually want a measure of power, and measuring the influ-
ence of a state is, in every respect, more difficult than measuring its attrib-
utes. When, for example, we move on to consider the notion of the ‘balance
of power’ we will want to ask ourselves what it is that is being balanced,
and how we could tell whether a balance exists. In each case it would be
helpful if we were able simply to assume that power is measurable in terms
of attributes. Once we are obliged to accept that power-as-influence is not
directly related to power-as-attribute we are bound to encounter problems.
The measurement of influence is bound to be difficult because what we
are looking for are changes in the behaviour of an actor that are caused by
the attempt of another to exert power, and, of course, in any practical
situation there are always going to be a range of other possible reasons why
an actor’s behaviour might have changed which either could have been
determining even in the absence of the actions of another, or, at the very
least, which reinforced the effects of the latter. There may be some cases
where it is possible to identify a moment in the course of negotiations, or
in the process of making a particular decision, where it can be said that
such-and-such a consideration was decisive, but the standard literature on
decision-making suggests that this sort of ‘essence of decision’ is rare.
Moreover, even when a particular decision can be pinned down in this way,
the circumstances leading up to the decisive moment are always going to
have been complex and involve a number of different factors. In effect, the
attempt to isolate one factor, a particular influence-attempt, involves the
construction of a counter-factual history – what would the world have been
like had someone acted differently? Nonetheless, these difficulties should
not be exaggerated; historians cope with this dilemma all the time – any
historical narrative is obliged to confront the problem of assigning influence
to particular factors and this seems to get done without too much hardship.